The Mid-Atlantic Assizes
A Novel of Justice at Sea

About this book:

On a storm-lashed Atlantic crossing in 1844, the paddle-steamer *Caledonia* carries eighty-four cabin passengers, thirty Irish emigrants, and a cargo of secrets heavier than her coal bunkers. When a death in the night shatters the fragile order of the voyage, Captain Joshua Vance—a man who trusts only wind, iron, and his own judgment—must convene a shipboard assizes: a jury of twelve berths, a lawyer who treats justice as ledger-balancing, and an American with missing fingers and a past that smells of gunpowder. Beyond the reach of any crown or congress, the law becomes whatever the master says it is—until the sea decides otherwise.

Arthur Rowe came aboard to seize American rail assets for London creditors, his iron trunks bolted down and his contracts watertight. But the *Caledonia* has no use for Chancery decrees. As the ship drives deeper into the western ocean, Rowe finds himself locked in a duel with a fellow passenger who knows exactly what his ledgers conceal, a surgeon who doses courage with peppermint cordial, and a steerage father whose dying daughter may be the only innocent soul aboard. Evidence vanishes. Testimony shifts with the deck plates. And the storm gathering astern cares nothing for jurisdiction.

*The Mid-Atlantic Assizes* is a masterwork of maritime historical suspense—part courtroom drama, part seafaring thriller, wholly alive with the grit, vernacular, and moral weight of the age of steam. For readers who love Patrick O'Brian's deck-level authenticity, C.J. Sansom's legal intrigue, or the claustrophobic tension of a locked-room mystery where the room is a vessel three thousand miles from land.